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Racing must “encourage a sense of fun and adventure” said Rod Street, Project Manager of the RFC BHA initiatives at today’s London Conference. Brian and Ben were notable by their absence.
Mr Street sketched out initiatives for introduction by 2011, including team championships [i:17mvjidv][?][/i:17mvjidv], “branded” Flat and Jumps seasons, and a “fantastic European finale” for the Flat season. As the Racing Post report adds: “Precise details of these and other major initiatives were not given.”
Mr Street also opined that negotiations with the interested parties was akin to “wading through treacle.” The gentleman sounds thoroughly dispirited, and with such earth-shaking ideas as these on the table, no wonder.
Let me the first to award Mr Street the Lame Dog and Style Award for 2010.
Please, please no more ‘team championships’ if they are to be a re-hash of the Shergar Cup or flat jocks Vs Jump jockeys and the like.
The idea of a European Breeders Cup is one I like. Let the Americans get on with their own but why not have ours, alternating between France, England, Ireland with perhaps the odd trip to Germany and Italy. Have it, say, two/three weeks after Arc weekend.
Surely Arc weekend end is the European breeders cup ? It’s not a comparison i’d make though, as the arc has been around for over 6 decades longer, so the breeders cup is the american arc !
Cheltenham Festival
Aintree
Sandown ex-Whitbread
Craven
Guineas
Chester May
York Dante
Derby
Royal Ascot
Eclipse
Newmarket July
Ebor
etc etcAnd they go on about ‘creating a narrative’. Do me a favour.
Oh, please no European Breeders Cup. We’ve already got a perfectly good one out in the States and there are plenty of excellent Pan-European championship races for the Europeans to establish a pecking order. Racing should be MORE international, not less.
Agree wholeheartedly with railway guard.
In the article, the chap goes on about Group One races being moved to a Saturday. He seems in favour. Thank God there are forces of sanity in there who seem to recognise the madness of that proposal (and people who now recognise just how completely insane it was to move the Derby to a Saturday, the worst collective decision racing has made since 1961)
Denuding further the midweek schedule dilutes the narrative further until it all becomes as uninteresting as a January midweek day; racing for obsessives at gaff jump tracks and flat sandpits of no interest to anyone with an imagination.
At least if they move all the Group 1 races to Saturday Her Maj can take the first 4 days of Royal Ascot off. She’s getting on now you know.
RFC promised us a regular programme of new initiatives to maintain the momentum that the likes of the decimal odds fiasco created. Astonishingly that seems to have been considered a success because it got non-racing media talking about the sport. Never mind that the coverage was proof that all publicity is not good publicity.
If the RP report
http://www.racingpost.com/news/horse-ra … 85306/top/
is really all there was to the latest rip-roaring instalment then we’ll soon be hearing about plans to put extra mayo in the prawn sandwiches.My sentiments towards Racing For Change are like those I have towards Portsmouth. At the start I wished them well and admired their pluck in difficult circumstances, but now I realise that it’s better for the long-term health of the sport if they are put out of their misery soon.
Fun and Adventure
Sounds like ’40s advertising copy for the latest Enid Blyton
‘Five Go Off To The Races’ colloquially known as ‘Julian And Dick Do Their Dough’
You have it in a nutshell Railway Guard
It isn’t the ‘narrative’ that’s the problem: the problem is racing has metamorphosed Hulk-like from a slim jolly accessible Blytonesque 200 pages of large print peppered with pretty pictures into a dense turgid inaccessible 2000 pages of small print with no pictures, or even paragraphs
War and Peace without the ‘narrative’ or intrigue
When RFC, figure out how to get 5% of the 12 billion quid bet on racing in the UK annually, directly back into racing, then its problem solved.
They can do this by building a 5% Tote, devising a national lottery type scratch card available in every newsagent and supermarket throughout the country and by looking at ways to get back some of the hundreds of millions of breeding income generated by the stallions and mares who are "made" on UK racecourses.
600 million, directly back into the sport annually, 600 million that doesn’t even need to be generated, just redirected, its already out there.
RFC should be applauded for any concept that increases the public awareness of racing but we all know that accessing the betting income is the way forward, to generate a secure, well funded, well run sport that appeals to both purist, day-tripper and punter alike.
When RFC was first mentioned on here by Silvoir and Rob, I asked the question about scope. Silvoir kindly passed on Nick Attenborough’s details, so I asked him about scope, but didn’t get a reply.
If a Project Manager has now been appointed, then he should be working to a scope (otherwise he’s a complete charlatan), and this scope should provide the kind of details that are apparently "not forthcoming" at this stage.
No-one outside the closeted world of RFC appears to know what the terms of reference for this endeavour are, and what the success criteria might be. A very shrewd move on the part of RFC, because it means that they cannot be measured by any external party, and can therefore flush as much money down the drain as they want, and call it a resounding success once the initiative is deemed complete, or the cash runs out – whichever happens quickest.
I would have offered to project manage this initative for them, and given money seems no object, they might even have been able to afford my exorbitant day-rate.
This is doomed to abject and total failure, for as long as none of the Stakeholders (and that very definitely includes us punters) knows exactly what they are trying to achieve.
Good post Grasshopper. RFC is all about what concessions insiders are willing to make. They don’t want to change but at the same time don’t want to be seen publicly as resistant to change. Hence the secrecy imo.
Its interesting there’s being no news whatsoever on fixtures for 2011. No coincidence that Levy negotiations are imminent. Perhaps the bookmakers haven’t posted the script to High Holborn just yet.
while its a nice thought to have a big finale to the uk flat season,this SHOULD have been done 25 years ago!sadly the horse has bolted….the breeders cup and arc day will always be the flat finale and nothing that RFC may do will change that unless the champion stakes prize money goes up to 4,00000 and that isnt going to happen is it!
what is very strange is the plan to end the jumps championships at the festival…on the one hand they say that they cant end on national day as they would get lost in the "national hype" but then want to them to finish on gold cup day.
if that was the case this year,whos going to be worried about who the champion jockey/trainer is when you have the kauto/denman showdown?
it also seems harsh on the great festival at aintree is not part of the main season and as for the sandown finale,well thats gone off the radar.
finaly whats the chances of the cheltenham gold cup being run on a saturday in 2011?I’d like to offer you 100/1, runandskip, but the fellow from R4C is an advocate of the move. Its more like 2/1.
You could run a mule race on the Saturday at Cheltenham, where the fences are supermarket boxes and the mules are ridden by robotic jockeys. People would still turn up.
Like it or not, racing has to compete with the great God football. We’re lucky on Saturdays relatively with the Sun and Mirror pullouts, but the broadsheets and their prophet of doom editorial teams are less keen.
They rely on intense football coverage. Overkill football coverage. There is no guarantee that the Gold Cup – or any other Showcase Group One – would gain publicity benefits from the move in the winter/spring.
The Gold Cup has the Friday to itself. The Kauto – Denman clash is a mouthwatering story for a Friday but is it more mouthwatering event than Man Utd vs Liverpool on the Saturday? To you and I there isn’t a molecule of comparison between the contests, but to the the general public?
The Derby HAD the Wednesday to itself – it even used to make the national news in olden times. A few years ago they squeezed the Derby into the half-time break of an England football match. The Derby. The BHA should have resigned en masse. I was ashamed. I can imagine the reaction on generally national hunt oriented boards like this one if they did that with the hallowed Gold Cup.
I tend to agree with Max. For sheer publicity alone, a midweek derby makes sense
As for this end of season Championship stuff…no thanks
It would naturally require a downgrading of quite a few late season cards with some consequent low grade boring Saturdays. Racing would do well to remember to hold onto its existing audience who (like me perhaps) probably enjoy the nice sequence of events in Sept/Oct rather more than seven Saturdays of sprint handicaps followed by two solid days of group ones
I would have thought a good idea would be to simply remove some of the dross and with a reduced fixture list have better prize money to spread around.
I appreciate the bookmakers have to be kept happy, but look at the system in Ireland and the fact a large majority of their meetings have a quality race on the card.
To make racing appealing is all good and well and i agree something must be done, but waffling on about set days and themed events (i saw mention of world cup related races) is just side-stepping the real issues IMO.
Its not to say certain actions wont help, but id be looking firstly at the overkill of dreadful meetings which are only in existence to keep the bookies happy.
Ending the jumps at the Festival is a simple no brainer and would not work.
At the moment Sandown is ideal mainly beacuse it is the best way to move from one code to the next all in the same afternoon without effort.
Flat wise Champions Day always gets mentioned as the place to end the flat season but this would then mean running the Racing Post Trophy on the All Weather or moving it to Newmarket.
Some sports have moved their seasons, Super League which now gets branded as a summer sport but many die hard Rugby League fans still say it is a winter one.
The RFC people still need to do more research and not ruin this sport i love in a way that puts me off it.
You’ll be pleased with this, then, bagnall. Check out Nic Coward’s PR piece on the front page of the RP. He talks about "Premier" meetings on Friday, Saturday and Sunday with increased terrestrial coverage. All well and good, but the sandboys in the last two races at Southwell tomorrow race for £1,714 win prize money.
Will R4C reduce that still further to pay for racing’s Premier fixtures? At what point do you sell your Class 6 horse because you cannot make 50% of your purchase price and training fees? Is this Gosden and Cumani’s elitist two tier system by another name?
"On the betting front, tentative plans have been discussed to put on daily "branded feature betting races", which have echoes of the abandoned Showcase events." (Coward)
Love it. One per day, a £10k to £25k sponsored handicap with sixteen runners (inc reserves), run at 5.15pm in summer and a 1pm "Lunch Money" handicap hurdle in the winter.
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